


Awaiting The Wretched Tide

by AdvisedPanic



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Anxiety, Depicted panic attack, Drug Use, Graphic Depiction of Stillbirth, LITERALLY, M/M, Overdose, PTSD, Tony Stark Dies but Always Comes Back, Tony Stark is a Phoenix, Vignettes, graphic depictions of death, here we go babeyy, non graphic torture, phoenix au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-31
Updated: 2019-05-31
Packaged: 2020-04-05 04:30:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19041157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdvisedPanic/pseuds/AdvisedPanic
Summary: I am on Fire, watch me burn; awaiting the wretched tide to turn...*Tony imagines laying his hands on Barnes’ skin and watching it redden and welt. He imagines bubbling burns with the shape of the whirls of his fingerprints visible in the white, weeping lines on the meat of Barnes’ shoulders or the inside of his thighs. He thinks about wrapping his hands around Barnes’ throat and leaving a collar of welts there, the exact shape of the antemortem necklace his mother wore to her funeral. He thinks about digging his fingers in and making it hurt, and then watching as the burns melt away and heal and vanish after an hour, maybe two.or: Tony Stark is a phoenix, and nothing is ever easy.





	Awaiting The Wretched Tide

**Author's Note:**

> welcome!!
> 
> this is my entry for the Iron Man Big Bang! i worked with two FABULOUS artists, whose info you can find with their art in the fic, in the notes at the bottom of the fic, and on tumblr!! please check them out, they're both astounding artists and amazing people.
> 
> some trigger warnings: this fic's tags are serious. there is a depicted stillbirth (that is temporary) and a successful overdose (also temporary). There is also a depicted panic attack. If there's something I've missed or tagged inappropriately, please let me know and I'll fix it right away.
> 
> i hope you enjoy!! xx

Art by [feignedsobriquet](https://feignedsobriquet.tumblr.com/)

∞

Anthony Edward Stark dies before he’s even born.

The umbilical cord wraps around his neck in the womb, strangles him. He comes out cold. It takes an hour cradled in the arms of his father, warmed by ancient and sacred fire, for him to wake up for the first time. His tiny body bleeds ash and reddens at the internal touch of flame, and he lets out a wail—and so does his mother, shuddering in relief at the miraculous return of a stillborn son.

Tony doesn’t remember it. As far as he’s concerned, it may as well have never happened at all.

◉

“Tony,” Howard Stark says as he folds his newspaper into crisp little sections, “You and I are different. People out there—our enemies—know that they can hurt us and it won’t be murder. You listening to me? They can and will kill you without repercussions.”

Tony Stark is four years old.

“Like Zebediah,” Howard continues. “He murdered me, boy. Are you listening? _Murdered_. And nobody can do anything because I’m sitting right in front of you. So, whenever someone hurts you—whenever you’re murdered, because you will be—you hurt them right back. Don’t let anyone know you’ve done it. But you make it right.”

Howard lays the newspaper down on the table. _Zebediah Stane Dead In Tragic Car Accident._

“You’ll see one day, that dying isn’t something you can forget. A death for a death. Never forget that, Tony.”

◉

It’s only fitting Howard Stark dies for good in a car accident, isn’t it? Only fitting that he kills Maria Stark with the hydroplaning wheels, a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit, and the trunk of a tree that was planted after Howard fucking Stark was born.

Death for a death. What horseshit.

At his grave, Tony spits, “I can’t kill _you,_ dad.”

◉

And you know the rest. Or, at least, most of it.

◉

Pepper has always known how to pop every single one of his good-idea balloons.

“You really think you can live in that tower with them, after everything that’s happened?” she asks, head tilted; her eyes are sharp enough that he instinctively holds his breath, like if he does, her attention will cut his throat. “With _Steve?_ ”

Tony shrugs, leans back in the chair in her office, fidgeting.

She rolls her eyes. “You haven’t even thought that far ahead, have you.”

“Of course I have,” Tony lies. He’s thought about it plenty. But he’s pushed most of it away when it sends his anxiety skyrocketing, whatever, so sue him. “I’ve been preoccupied with the whole _get them pardoned_ thing first, Pep. You know politics isn’t my strong suit.”

“Oh, I know, Tony,” Pepper says, but she’s smiling a little in the corner of her mouth. “But that’s where this is going—you and them living in the Tower again. Together. You won’t be able to live anywhere else; if the public finds out, the team will look like a sham.”

“I can deal with everybody just fine,” Tony replies. He’s worked this out in his head, but it’s…helpful—nice, even—to talk it out with Pepper. She pops his balloons but it keeps him grounded. “Natasha and them—they were doing what they had to, it’s fine. We’ve dealt with that on the S.I. board, except me and the spies got to punch each other a couple times to get the energy out, it’s no big deal.”

“But?”

Tony shrugs. “I’m still a little jittery, that’s all, Pep. I’ll be fine once everything is back to normal.”

Pepper gives him a disbelieving look. “Tony, _nothing_ is going to be normal again. Not after Siberia.”

“It will be,” Tony insists. “I can fix it. Once they’re back, once we clear the air—”

“Do they even know what happened?”

“Nobody but you, Pep.” He has...failed to mention the bombshell about Barnes to her. She was ready to strongarm T’Challa into an extradition treaty herself after he told her the entire “it resorted to physical violence” situation from the bunker last year; she would have actually ripped the new King a new political asshole if she knew he was harboring his mom’s murderer. So, he’s kept that little nugget to himself, come what may.

“Tony,” Pepper sighs, reprimanding.

“The world needs the Avengers, Pep,” Tony insists. “They need the symbol of it. We opened the door, so we need to stand against whatever we’ve let in. I’ve had six months to be angry. I’ll get over whatever pissiness I have left once Steve and I have a good cry, and then it’ll be fine.”

Pepper leans back in her chair and shrugs. “Okay, Tony. You know I’m with you. Do you need anything from me?”

“Just help me get a pardon on the table at the Accords council,” Tony replies. “I’ve done the groundwork, but I need you for the…”

“Talking to people part?” Pepper fills in.

Tony brightens. “Exactly! Thank you, Pep.”

“You’re welcome,” she replies. She leans forward. He can see the bright reflection of his golden eyes in hers. “Fill me in.”

◉

They succeed. They get the Avengers to come home.

Tony spends the night before getting raging, sickeningly drunk. He’s an inch away from alcohol poisoning before he collapses into bed and has, for the moment, forgotten what’s in store for him in the morning.

◉

The thing about Tony and Steve is that they work well together.

Really well, actually. For two men more stubborn than mountains that fight Nazis and aliens for a living, they mesh in ways nobody expected them to. Took a little doing, of course, but before the whole Sibera thing, they were...friends.

Tony’s still sitting on that one. He pokes at it every once in a while to check if it hurts. He does just that today, reminding himself of the good times, the friendly days; his heart and his lungs ache, especially sharp when he lifts his eyes and catches Steve’s from across the conference room.

Yup. Still hurts.

“I’ll let you all get settled in,” Tony says, brightly, cutting himself off from feeling too shitty about it. He’s vibrating with energy and anxiety, all the Avengers briefed and the Amended Accords all provisionally signed, and it won’t do to be called out for it. “Everything’s where it should be. Lang, Falcon—Barnes, FRIDAY will take you to your floors.”

“Tony,” Steve says, and Tony winces, his back to the room. His skin tingles with the knowledge that Barnes is looking at him and that Tony can’t see it. “Can we talk?”

“Not right now, the boss has me on a tight schedule,” he says, beaming, as he turns back around. Barnes is looking at him; Tony can see it from the corner of his eye. “Now with all of you here, I’m working ‘round the clock to update your gear. Thank me later!”

“Tony!” Steve calls, but Tony is gone, fight-or-flight.

◉

Pepper keeps him busy for the first three days the Avengers are back. By the time Steve manages to corner him, he’s actually settled into the knowledge the others are back in his nest, that Barnes hasn’t left his floor since he got there, and that the new guys (especially Lang) are kind of decent.

FRIDAY might be in on the clearing-the-air-thing, since the elevator that was supposed to take him to his rooms opens on the common floor and Steve is there, blinking at him in identical surprise.

“Tony,” he says, and steps in. There’s hesitation, an awareness of their bodies in the same place. Tony thinks he’s looking to see if Tony flinches when they stand too close together.

“Cap,” he replies. He feels hot beneath his collar, anxiety peaking into warmth.

It’ll take less than ten seconds for the elevator to reach Steve’s floor, less for Barnes’. Ten seconds to span the gulf of what happened between them; ten seconds to repair what was broken in that cold Siberian bunker. Ten seconds to acknowledge the ashes.

“Thank you,” Steve says. “For—the Amended Accords. They’re good. You—did a lot for us.”

“I tried,” Tony replies. His head tilts a little, neck almost cracking.

“We appreciate it. All of us.” A pause. Tony can almost see the calculations going on in his head. “Bucky too. He says his therapy is—good.”

“Only the best for our resident soldier,” Tony says, and is almost surprised that he’s able to keep the bitterness swallowed. Right now, in this elevator, with Steve looking at him in the corner of his eyes—he feels angrier at him than Barnes. Barnes was a tool, used for exactly what he was built to do.

Steve _chose_ to hurt Tony.

 _A death for a death,_ says Howard Stark, forty-something years ago.

The elevator opens. Steve steps out, turns around. He makes to block the door, but thinks better of it, meeting Tony’s eyes as the doors slide shut. The gulf between them is as wide as it was before, the tide pressing them apart.

◉

This thing happens to Tony every once and awhile, whenever he’s pent up. He’s a phoenix, the whole ash and fire thing, but he very rarely shows signs of it beyond a slightly higher internal body temperature and the sunburst of gold in his eyes.

But whenever he’s...got too much in him—too much energy, too many ideas, too much anxiety, you get the picture—he gets hot. Really, _really_ hot. We’re talking five-or-six-hundred-degrees-to-the-touch hot. Tony, once upon a time, used to call it _molting._ But he doesn’t have wings—never will—so he never bothered to explain it to the team or anyone else who doesn’t already know about the hot flashes.  

It happened to Howard, too. Tony remembers whenever he’d get drunk or have a deadline or not get something to work right, Howard would burn the handrails when he’d stumble down the stairs, or turn the blankets his mom used to buffer his skin from hers to ash. When Tony was a kid, he’d made the mistake of not getting out of Howard’s drunken, stumbling way and had a messy burn scar on his forearm for years after.

(He doesn’t have that particular scar anymore, but Tony can still sometimes feel where it used to sit.)

It’s yet another thing Howard passed onto Tony. It happened to him a lot right after Afghanistan, but tapered off with Iron Man and the Avengers. Now, of course, the episodes are back with a vengeance.

It’s the third one this month, and Tony’s been sweating it out in his workshop. FRIDAY’s locked the place down under the guise of a working binge, which seems to do the trick in placating Steve’s occasional inquiries into Tony’s health.

At the peak of the too-hot episode, FRIDAY says, “Boss, Sergeant Barnes is asking for admittance.”

Tony blinks. He’s been working with schematics for the day, since his touch is still like hot coals; he steps away from the holographic displays and asks, “…to come down here? To talk to me?”

“Sounds like it, boss,” FRIDAY reports. Her voice is not JARVIS’, but it is comforting in a different way. A stranger showing kindness, only to never learn their name. “He says you offered to do some upgrades on his gear, should he require it.”

“Shit, I did say that, didn’t I,” Tony says aloud. He doesn’t trust anyone to work on the Avengers’ gear but himself, especially after SHIELD hit the fan. Barnes, for all his superpowered juice, utilizes his tac gear more than most of the members. He falls into the same category as Widow and Steve—reliant on tech, but not a liability without.

“Let him down,” Tony decides after a moment. FRIDAY replies by immediately sending the elevator up to whatever floor Barnes is on.

Barnes hasn’t shown his face in nearly two weeks around Tony. Maybe he’s picked up the danger signals he’s been sending out, or maybe the palpable anxiety that rolls off him in waves when he’s in a room with him—but whatever the case, Tony’s been grateful. Getting used to the Tower being filled again has been...unnerving.

The elevator descends, and Tony turns his head just as Barnes steps out. He’s in dark pants and boots, with a casual long-sleeve shirt that covers most of his metal arm. With his hair down and eyes dark, he looks—okay, is a word that comes to mind. Not assassin-like.

“Mr. Stark,” Barnes says, almost hesitantly. He pauses, and then clumsily shrugs his synthetic shoulder. Tony realizes Barnes is uncertain— _awkward._ “Sorry to bother you. I’ve got—it’s a snag, in my shoulder. Can’t reach it.”

Tony eyes him. It’s not that he thinks Barnes is going to hurt him—there hasn’t been a Winter Soldier episode in two months, now—but there’s still an inherent suspicion that Tony’s been nursing around the body that killed his parents. Sue him. He may not blame the guy, but he knows bloody hands; he doesn’t want to get stained.

Tony spreads his hands a little self-deprecatingly. “Sorry, C3PO,” he says. “I’d help, but I’m a little too hot to handle right now.”

Barnes stares at him. Tony grins winningly. “Raincheck?”

Barnes continues to stare. Tony feels a deep uneasiness crawl up his throat. He puts his hand on his workshop table with a little too much emphasis, and Barnes’ eyes skitter and catch on the charcoal-scorched print he leaves behind after three seconds, as though his hand was white-hot iron.

“I’ll burn you,” Tony elaborates.

Barnes tilts his head. His eyes move from the handprint and up to Tony’s brightly molten eyes. Tony can see the way he gathers his words, lining them up in his throat like a tidy little clothesline, and strings them out one by one. “I wouldn’t mind. Getting burned, I mean.”

He makes as though to continue but stops. Tony gives him a second to line up more words, then two. He doesn’t, and his mouth stays shut.

Tony thinks about it. He imagines laying his hands on Barnes’ skin and watching it redden and welt. He imagines bubbling burns with the shape of the whirls of his fingerprints visible in the white, weeping lines on the meat of Barnes’ shoulders or the inside of his thighs. He thinks about wrapping his hands around Barnes’ throat and leaving a collar of welts there, the exact shape of the antemortem necklace his mother wore to her funeral. He thinks about digging his fingers in and making it _hurt_ , and then watching as the burns melt away and heal and vanish after an hour, maybe two.

Tony shakes his head, dislodging the vivid images from the backs of his eyes. “Uh, sorry. No can do. Come back in a day or two and I’ll fix it up without giving you a third degree, yeah?”

Barnes nods. Tony can tell he’s a little less vulnerable than he was before, some imperceptible shield erected between them—between Barnes and the world. Tony feels a brief and sudden needle-prick of guilt at the sight.

“Thanks for your time, Mr. Stark,” Barnes says, and he disappears into the elevator. Tony sits down on his chair and feels distantly lightheaded. Like heatstroke.

“Fuck,” he says, to no one in particular.

∞ ∞

Tony’s second death is the first he remembers.

Maria and Howard Stark die. Jarvis wakes Tony up in the middle of the night and tells him, sitting on the edge of his bed, eyes wide and sad and tie still tight around his neck. Tony is very drunk, post-argument liquor barely slept off.

“Anthony,” Jarvis whispers, aware of the quiet and stillness of the world at night. “Your father’s remains are being held until he wakes. Your mother…she…”

Tony knows. He hugs Jarvis because it seems like the right thing to do and he’s always touchy when he’s drunk. Jarvis accepts it and embraces him back, rocking Tony like a child even though neither of them are crying. Jarvis has seen his father die and come back to life a half dozen times now. It is not him they are mourning.

Morning is very far away. He and Jarvis sit at the dining room table—grand and dark and very, very empty—nursing cups of tea. Jarvis has loosened his tie, downcast and slow to react. The phone rings. Jarvis gets up to answer it. He comes back, and his face is white, hands shaking.

“Anthony,” he whispers. “Your father…he is…he’s not coming back.”

“What?” Tony snaps. Fury blinds him for the briefest of moments, sharp through his boozy haze. “He’s _leaving_? Mom is dead and he’s just leaving us behind?”

“No, son,” Jarvis whispers. He looks lost in a way Tony has never seen before. “He’s dead. He hasn’t woken up.”

“What?” Tony says for a second time. He blinks. “No. He’s like me. He’s a phoenix. He can’t die.”

Jarvis sits. He’s staring at his knees, breath coming in short, wet pants. He’s barely holding it together. He lost his wife a year ago—that had been the first time Tony had seen Jarvis cry. He seems close to it now, too. “I don’t know, Tony. I don’t know. He always wakes up in an hour. Never more than two. He isn’t coming back.”

Tony sits, mind past shock. It’s such an outrageous thought that it must be true. Tony is very, very drunk right now. He’d gotten hammered after giving his mom the cold shoulder before they left on their trip. After arguing with his father, spitting brimstone insults. He wants very badly to be sober so he can comfort Jarvis and so he can think about this without the muffle of cotton and booze.

Tony leans over and hugs Jarvis again. “Maybe it’s just taking longer this time,” Tony reasons, knowing it’s a lie. Jarvis huffs a sad little breath, aware Tony is lying. He hugs Tony back anyway. Tony pulls away.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he says. He smiles and he knows it’s wobbling a bit on the corners. “A cold one.”

Jarvis nods. He’s always hated it when Tony gets drunk. Tony leaves and collects a little black case from his room before locking himself in the bathroom. He starts the shower. Steam fills the room.

Tony looks at himself in the mirror. The world is slivered into a few shaking pieces, vision shivering. He wants to be sober very badly. He _needs_ to be.

Tony opens the black case and makes himself sober with three consecutive hits of heroin.

Tony wakes up to a news bulletin on his TV in his room: _A Night of Family Tragedy: Will the Stark Phoenixes Rise?_ They show pictures of Howard and Maria Stark smiling, arms linked. Howard’s eyes are bright and ringed with gold. They move to an aerial shot of a wooded road that’s periodically lit up by flashing lights of red and blue-and-red-and-blueandredandblue. Then a warning of a graphic photo, a serious news anchor coaxing children to turn their eyes away.

A member of the house staff must have sold a photo of Obie carrying Tony’s lifeless body out of the bathroom, Jarvis’ back nearly blocking the sight of Tony’s dead eyes. There’s vomit down Tony’s shirtfront and clinging to his blue lips. The oozing track marks are visible in the naked curve of his elbow. Jarvis is crying. Obie is not.

Jarvis is asleep next to Tony’s bedside. He’s holding Tony’s hand, slim fingers over his pulse. Tony rubs the inside of his elbow. It is smooth and unblemished. He is very, very sober.

◉

Not long after a _particularly_ bad anxiety attack, Tony rolls out the soot from his hands as he picks up a bottle of vodka and goes to the roof.  Of course Bucky Barnes finds him there.

Tony hears him coming. It’s the telltale whirr and shift of mechanical plates that’s been humming in the silence of his nighttime hours that helps him figure it out. Silent footfalls. A shift of cloth. An exhaled breath, deliberately loud.

Tony is very drunk.

“What’s it like, being back at home?” he says, almost a hiccup, close to a misplaced breath.

Barnes approaches. He stands by where Tony is leaning against the lip of the roof, below the gravel flat where Selvig set up the Tesseract portal, all those years ago. He’s out of striking distance. Tony glances at him but turns his attention away, fast.

“It’s good,” Barnes replies, a beat too late. “Closer to home than—Wakanda. I feel—well.”

Tony gestures loosely at the city before them, tiny and divided into neat little squares. “Feel right at home. Know the feeling. I was born here. Manhattan. Mom was too. She grew up here. Society woman.”

Barnes is very quiet. Tony looks over at him. He’s watching the ground however many of hundreds upon hundreds of feet down, gooseflesh visible on his flesh arm. He looks tired. Tony relates. He’s also very drunk, which is probably why he can talk about his mom in front of the guy whose hands killed her.

Speaking of.

Tony doesn’t know what to do, now that his brain has caught up with the rest of him. He saw this man kill his mom—a human that couldn’t come back. He saw the video, the cold eyes. He’d seen it and thought _of course it had to be you._

But in the end, it wasn’t...Bucky, Tony knows that. It was another thing wearing his face, moving his hands. A thing that didn’t feel, didn’t think; a thing that survived cryo for seventy years, that endured unthinkable torture. That thing died when Steve let it punch him within an inch of his life.

The thing that killed Maria Stark died when Bucky Barnes came back to life.

Tony feels his body relax. Nothing is solved—nothing back to the way it was—but he can finally voice the quiet thing that’s been stewing in him for weeks now.

“Not angry at you anymore,” Tony reveals, despite not meaning to have said that. He’s a little too drunk right now, but it’ll work. Barnes glances over, eyes wide, nose and cheeks pinked from the wind. Expressive. Not the dead eyes of the Fist of HYDRA. “Had to be, at first. You get that, right? I watched her die. Felt like I was back there again, listening to my—to Jarvis say she was gone. Hurt worse that Steve didn’t tell me. Let me see the tape instead. That was shitty.”

“He should have told you,” Barnes whispers. He rubs his arms, up and down, brisk. “It shouldn’t have been that way.”

Tony nods magnanimously. “She wasn’t like me,” he moves on, an informational tone. “Couldn’t come back. When she died, that was it. Candle blown out. One and done. Dad though? Should have come back. Didn’t though. Fucking cheater.”

He’s rambling. Tony moves his mind away from his long dead parents and towards the future. “So, look. You don’t have to explain yourself or lock yourself in your room to stay away from me or whatever. I’m done being angry with you. I’m nervous because you’re an assassin, whatever, and apparently I have PTSD, who’d’ve thought. Let me be angry at Steve for a while, and then I’ll get over that too. Sound good?”

Barnes makes a sound in the back of his throat that Tony can’t decipher. “Why are you fine with it? After what I did—what _Steve_ did to you—”

Tony blinks. Barnes’ tone is distinctly emphasized but Tony doesn’t know what specific thing he’s referring to. He is _way_ too drunk to navigate this conversation correctly. He tries anyway.

“I had fourteen months to be angry,” Tony replies. He shrugs and waves at the city with his bottle of vodka. “I don’t like being angry, Barnes. I’m too old for that shit. It’ll kill me one day.”

Tony laughs at his own joke. Barnes doesn’t. “I die all the time,” Tony explains, giggling helplessly. “It’s kind of my thing. Should have seen Steve’s face the first time I came back in front of him.”

Tony obligingly recreates the dumbstruck-ecstatic expression he still remembers. He laughs it away and shifts most of his weight against the lip of the building. “Don’t worry about it,” he says when he looks over and sees that Barnes looks green at his gills. “I’m not kidding. I’ve died a bunch. Always come back.”

“I—when they woke me up for the first time, it felt like coming back from the dead,” Barnes whispers. Tony jerks a little but even though he’s drunk he knows better than to interrupt. Barnes is outright trembling from the cold now. “And then the rest felt like—felt like death. Like I was dyin’ again. Slow.”

Barnes’ throat clicks. Tony nods agreeably when no more words come. “Sounds shitty,” he offers philosophically.

Tony’s surprised _that’s_ what get Barnes to laugh, short and sharp, like glass. “It was,” Barnes agrees. Tony glances at him. He looks just as surprised as Tony feels, but the weariness in his face has transformed into something pleased, like he’s happy Tony isn’t coddling him or whatever. He’s clenching his jaw to stop his teeth from chattering.

“Cold?” Tony asks. Barnes shrugs, icy breath puffing from him.

Tony hums. He shifts his stance and sighs as his thoughts turn from Barnes to Steve, who is undoubtedly doing all the coddling Barnes is annoyed with. Tony realizes he doesn’t want to go back downstairs and face those puppy eyes and the apologies that always come; apologies followed by explanations and rationales and pleas for a change.

“Fucking Steve,” he grouses. He realizes who he’s talking to. “Sorry. I think I want to be alone right now.”

Bucky nods, understanding. He takes a step back but then hesitates, glancing between the vodka, the lip of the roof, and the gold in Tony’s eyes. “You’re not going to…?”

It takes Tony a moment to realize what he’s asking. He laughs. “I’m the last person on Earth you should worry about there, Suicide Squad. I’m the only one on this fucking planet that’ll bounce back.” He waves the vodka bottle in Barnes’ direction. “Get, you need to warm up. Good night,” he continues, pointedly.

He listens to Barnes’ retreating footsteps. He closes his eyes and drops his head onto his crossed forearms, groaning. He drinks half of the bottle before he retreats to his room and falls asleep to newsreels of himself before he left for Afghanistan, when Tony Stark had only died twice and he was still young and whole and everything was so much simpler.

∞ ∞ ∞

The third death comes.

Before it does: he makes Stark Industries stockholders—and himself—a great deal of money. Jarvis dies. Tony has him buried next to his wife and memorializes him by naming an A.I. after him. Tony drinks and gambles and fucks and designs weapons that’ll kill people for good. He becomes _The Merchant of Death_ instead of _The Final Phoenix._ He meets and hires Pepper Potts. He thinks he falls in love, but it’s just a corporate spy. He gets drunk on the anniversary of his parents’ deaths but never shoots up again. He fucks over people left and right because he can. He goes to Afghanistan to fire a new missile because he’s a cocky, arrogant bastard. He wants the attention.

The long-earned knife in his back comes in the form of a Stark missile that shreds his chest and insides to pieces. He’s dead long before the terrorists descend from their mounted spots in the high, sandy hills.

He wakes up in the back of a truck, gasping for breath. There’s something wet in the back of his throat. He’s very hot. He thinks he can feel his fingers-hands-arms shaking. He dies gasping for breath, with unfamiliar faces peering down at him.

He wakes a third time beneath a stone ceiling. There is a very bright light atop of him that sears his eyes. His chest is awash with a burning sensation that is very different from heat. His chest is gaping open. He cannot breathe and he is very, very hot.

Tony Stark dies once more, a pure and writhing and ash-covered thing, beneath Ho Yinsen’s steady knife.

◉

It’s sometime that next week that Tony locks himself away to prepare for The Accords Meeting. It’s the Big Day: the Amended Accords are properly going on the chopping block, no changes or alterations allowed. Yes or No. Without a passing vote, they’re back to square one, and the Avengers will be stripped of their response certification until they can get something else on the table.

It’ll be _hell_ if these fucking Accords aren’t passed. Tony’s narrowed it down to a tight victory—what with King T’Challa’s support swaying several African countries in their direction, which pulled them from an unavoidable defeat that was projected only two months ago; but the debates and discussions that will lead up to the vote will decide the sway votes of Norway, the U.K., Singapore, South Korea, and Canada—big boy countries who’ve kept eerily silent about their thoughts. It could go either way, but day-of projections on the news are placing it the Amended Accords getting declined with a slight defeat.

Which is unacceptable. Thus: Tony and Pepper and a half-dozen lawyers locked away in serious talks and discussions for the entirety of the day, working out a strategy for the upcoming meeting. They’re categorizing the representatives and the arguments they’re statistically likely to agree with. They consider Tony’s wardrobe down to his briefs, weighing color psychology against being associated with Iron Man’s aggressive but familiar red scheme. They hold mock, devil’s advocate arguments from the sway and hard-no countries, calculating likely attacks and rebuttals.

It’s politics. Tony’s been playing this game since he was sixteen. It’s not his favorite pastime, and Pepper manages it far more gracefully than him, but it’s not unfamiliar territory.

But that familiarity doesn’t help the fact that when they finally disperse at eleven at night (fifteen hours spent there) Tony ends up pacing the meeting halls endlessly, heart racing. His skin is jittery with electricity and his fingers slip with ash and embers as he fumbles with an empty tumbler. His bones are thumping with the beat of his heart, echoing into the canals of his ears and throat, ricocheting up into his eyes and down into the aching cavern of his chest.

Oh, _fuck,_ he’s not prepared. But, at the same time, he knows he is. He _knows_ he knows the Accords, he _knows_ they’ve prepared more than humanly possible, he _knows it,_ but _fuck_ if he isn’t shaking out of his skin from the fucking idea of facing a question tomorrow he doesn’t know the answer to. Damn it! He should be okay—he’s _Tony Fucking Stark,_ the Merchant of Death, Iron Man, the illustrious and burning son of Howard Stark, the Final Phoenix—he shouldn’t be feeling like this.

He shouldn’t—oh, fuck, but if something happens tomorrow, if he sits there like an ass and chokes, if he flashes back to one of the multiple terrors of his life and loses his tongue, if he jitters too much or doesn’t smile bright enough they’ll all see the terror and desperation running in sweat lines across his temples, they’ll all _know_ he needs this, _know_ he’s not prepared, _know_ he’s failed everything at the finish line—

Is it hot in here? Tony loosens his tie and gasps for breath and swears there’s smoke in his throat, and— _fuck,_ smoke? Oh, god, is he dying? No, he can’t be—there’s no way—everyone else in the meeting was fine, he couldn’t have been poisoned—not a heart attack, no, fuck, is he dying? His nail beds feel hot but so do his ears, his chest flushing with fire—oh no, oh no oh no, please—

His back hits something hard—oh, the wall—the floor—he’s curling up, nails embedded in the meat of his thighs. This is number twelve, then? Spinning out of control, gasping for air, burning up in his own heat? His fire fanning the flames?

And then there’s a breeze—a rush—of cool air that Tony doesn’t notice quite at first, but it curls around his ears and through his hair, a brush of ice against his fire-flinted skin. It’s a kiss of relief. A presence of a migrating wall of ice settles in front of him, a collection of wind-swept snow building up to encase him, as far from imprisonment as one can get.

He sucks it in, gasping on the air that ought to be sharp but cuts straight through the smoke in his throat. It’s _relief_. It’s—it’s air, sweet air through the smoke. It’s the cool touch of life against his burning, dying skin.

Tony returns to his senses one at a time. First, touch—the cool air, the feeling of his nails in his thighs, pierced right through his slacks, the raw scrape of his throat; then, smell—smoke, cinders, wind-blown ice; then, hearing—the ragged pull of his breath, the whir of something mechanized near him, the pressure of wind against the glass at the end of the hall; then, finally, sight—greys and blacks of a nighttime gradient, barely any light, the expanse of his own heaving chest, and crouching knees near him covered in dark trousers.

Tony glances up. James Buchanan Barnes looks back at him, eyes bright with a ring of glacial light.

He considers _fancy meeting you here,_ but it doesn’t feel right. He moves to _what the fuck just happened to me and why the fuck was it you that had to witness it_ before dismissing it as both equally asinine as it is needlessly rude.

“Fuck,” is what he settles on, and it rattles out of him on the back of a shuddering breath.

Barnes doesn’t say anything. He puts his flesh hand on the back of Tony’s head and with the smallest exertion of pressure, pulls his head down to rest against Tony’s knees. Breathing suddenly becomes much easier. Barnes’ hand is as cold as an icepack against his head.

“Fuck,” Tony says again, breathing deep now, the edges still catching, but his vision has ceased to swim. “Oh, fuck. Wow. Talk about...embarrassing.”

“Not embarrassing,” Barnes replies, voice like a scratch and a cracking layer of ice against glass.

Tony presses against the ice on the back of his head. Barnes relents and lets him lift his head to lean against the wall, sore and stiff legs shifting out from their tense angles.

“A little embarrassing,” Tony mutters. He swallows. Takes a long look at Barnes. “...thanks.”

He realizes, a moment after he says this, that Barnes is very close to him. He’s crouched in front of Tony, where he’s crowded himself against the wall near a conference room door. Barnes’ hand has shifted from the back of his head to the nape of his neck, where it sits like a block of ice. Tony is leaning into it like if he turns away he’ll burst into flames.

He’s very cold. Honest-to-God goosebumps are breaking out across his neck and the backs of his shoulders. He’s...he’s never had goosebumps before.

“You’re cold,” Tony says.

“You’re warm,” Barnes replies. His cheeks are ruddy, Tony realizes. So are the tips of his ears. There’s sweat pooling in the strands of baby hair at his temple, just on the edge of breaking to roll down his jaw.

Barnes sees him looking. Tony sees Barnes see.

Tony knows where there’s a time for words and when there isn’t. This is a moment that one word—even the right one—will break whatever’s going on right now, in the equilibrium between their bodies. The place that Barnes is touching Tony’s skin is hypersensitive to the diffusion of shifting warmth, the radiating cold to the sinking heat.

Tony...isn’t sure if he wants this to break. He ought to want it to—for so many reasons. For the obvious and the not. But everything is...insignificant, compared to now. The past, the things that happened five, ten lifetimes ago. It’s all greyscale.

“You’re too cold,” Tony says, because for all the wordless and unspoken reasons he doesn’t want this to end, his need to know dwarfs the need for...this. “I never get cold.”

Barnes blinks, long and slow. His eyes are very, very blue. “...you’re too hot,” he replies, thick. There’s something deep in his throat that catches on the echo.  “I never get hot.”

“You’re like me,” Tony whispers.

Barnes nods.

Tony lifts his hand, touches the place where sweat is gathering at Barnes’ temples, touches the beads until the surface breaks and runs down his skin. His skin is ice and reddens dramatically at the faintest touch of Tony’s ashen fingers. Tony’s fingers feel like they’re frozen. His teeth ache from the cold.

“You’re like me,” Tony says again. “You’re a phoenix.”

“I burn cold,” Barnes says. “I...they…”

“Not born,” Tony says. His fingers have found a scar. Phoenixes don’t have scars. The place where his arc reactor once lived is unmarked. His dad was flawless till the day they buried him. “They made you like this?”

“Somehow. I fell—was...falling. Dragged away, with blood in the snow. Woke up. Felt like I was dyin’. Couldn’t stop, since I...I’m always cold, now. Feels the same.”

Tony considers him. “It always does. Feel that way.”

Now, Barnes takes a shuddering breath. “Yeah.”

The thing between them breaks, gentle as can be. Tony shifts back, just the slightest shift of weight, and Barnes retracts his hand, rocks back on his heels. He stands and steps back. Tony does the same, wobbling. Barnes makes to catch him but holds back, fingers flexing.

Barnes takes a step back. Then two. Turns around. Turns back again. “Steve doesn’t know. ‘Bout me.”

“Thought he would have picked up on it. The chilly atmosphere that follows you into a room,” Tony says, almost a quip, but too drawn to make it to the end.

“I don’t want him to know,” Barnes continues.

Tony crosses his heart with his finger. “Know what, Soldier?”

Barnes nods. How did Tony never notice how bright blue his eyes are? He’s got Steve beat by a mile. He disappears around the corner of the conference hall, silent as the snowfall.

Tony sucks in a deep breath. He’s returned to his normal state: warm, ashen, but not overheating with an anxiety attack that careened him straight into a full-blown panic. He adjusts his tie and glances back at the wall he plastered himself against in his fear.

The entire wall is covered with the ashen, emblazoned sear of splayed wings, raised in aggressive warning, the edges faintly smoldering like the ashes of a fire. Creeping tendrils of frost have crawled from the connection of the wings towards the aching feathers, splintering like crystals.

Art by [trashcanakin](https://trashcanakin.tumblr.com/)

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

The sixth death is stupid. Because _Tony_ is stupid. The palladium poisoning catches up to him before he can synthesize a new element to power his reactor. He collapses in his workshop, taking down a stack of his dad’s papers with him. His throat seizes up and his lungs fill with a viscous fluid that spills from popping geometric veins.

His fire burns some of the palladium from his blood, cleans his lungs with a wire brush. The shadows of wings burn into the cement of the floor, soot-stained, around where he fell.

JARVIS says, “Sir?” in a tone that reminds Tony of a photo of a crying man holding the wrist of a track-mark arm. Tony Stark comes back to life and gets back to work.

◉

It’s a bitch of a thing, dying.

Everyone knows. It’s funerals with hymns sung from sinner’s throats and tears that dry on the way to the wake. It’s condolences and murmurs about loss and cold nights after the incense fades.

Tony knows it personally. Knows its touch—the dark, the chill of the death of a flame. He’s done it a couple times now. Will do it a couple times more. But he’s only seen death’s touch on others when it shook hands with his parents, when it cut Obadiah’s throat with electric wire, when it kissed the faces of babes and common New Yorkers when the sky fell in.

But he’s never done this. Never held the body when death bends down and strangles the life away, bleeding out from eyes and open mouth and choking breath.

Never thought he would.

It starts like this: there’s an open dawn of a fight, a threat growing in the sprawling bridged city in Pennsylvania. They deploy half a team: high mobility, tac and control. Iron Man, Captain America, Falcon, Vision, Winter Soldier. A solid team. They pack up and get out in less than five minutes, less than twenty to arrive.

It’s not an alien invasion, but it’s a bitch of a fight—nameless cults, magic, revenge. There’s some kind of time bullshit going on, with whole blocks consumed with spots of slow-mo (like moving through molasses) or hyper-quick time (sliding on ice). It throws them off balance, the dynamic. They ping Strange for help, but it takes him two minutes to portal in, some necessary artifact locked away.

Two minutes—some are longer than others. Two minutes is a lifetime when it comes to dying.

It ends up that Tony doesn’t see it. He’s dealing with one of the spellcasters and Falcon’s voice comes over the comms, sharp and concerned and living a hundred different lives: _“Soldier’s down!”_

Strange appears. Tony hands over the reins to him; his bling controls the time blotches and Vision can get in close to the ranged casters. He moves to the Soldier’s position and flies down as Steve arrives.

Bucky is—he’s down, in the worst sense of the word. Got a massive shard of greenish-brackish crystal sticking out of his chest, bleeding into him like digitized lines of palladium. There’s a brackish tint to his skin, his throat, his lips. Blood, too, seeping between his teeth. A death rattle on his breath.

And he’s radiating cold, ice on his fingers and frosting the edges of his hair. Tendrils of cracking ice break out from under him like a splintering laketop across the asphalt. Steve’s skin pinks up as he kneels down.

“Bucky,” he says, and takes his hand only to drop it immediately, gasping; frostbite eats at his palm and fingertips.

“Shit,” Tony says. He sheds the suit, gets down close. His skin breaks out in goosebumps when he touches the edge of the protruding wound, but his fire is hot enough to ease away only steam, no biting touch. “Shit, soldier.”

“B-b-b-ad?” Bucky’s teeth clatter against each other, ice-fog rolling out of his nose, across the puffs of his uneven breaths.

“Yeah,” Tony says, just as Steve says, “You’re gonna be okay.”

Bucky grimaces. Tony shoots Steve a look. “Listen, Cap,” he says, firm, beseeching. “You trust me?”

Captain America looks at Tony, time paused, breathing deep. His eyes are wild with some feral fear, seventy some years younger. The last time they looked at each other like this—with James Buchanan Barnes between them—did not end with an affirmation. It did not end well at all.  

“S-Stev-ve,” Bucky says. Steve looks at him. The blue of his lips, the ice, the blood.

“Yes.”

How the world can change. Howard would be cheering.

Tony nods, swallows the irony—what has changed, really? “Get back, then. Down the block—maybe further.” He adjusts his grip, one hand on Bucky’s shoulder, the other on his trembling thigh. “The slow ones are always the worst.”

“Slow one? Tony—”

“Not now,” Tony interrupts. “Later. There’s no time—he’s going to go under, and he’s going to freeze everything nearby. You don’t _want_ to be nearby.”

“What about you?”

Tony puts on a grin. It feels sharp. “I’m the one that can’t die, Cap. Remember?”

Steve swallows. He looks down at Bucky, teeth clattering, eyes watery. Bucky looks at him. They nod, first Bucky, then Steve.

And then Steve goes, calling evacuations as he runs.

“Okay,” Tony says. His hands are prickling with an unfamiliar icy numbness. “Bucky—”

“D-die?” He’s holding it together like Tony did the first time around—certainty, an acknowledgement of upcoming pain, a goal to reach through the thorns. But that certainty passes after a while, after the darkness never brightens, the pain unchanging—worse—the nothingness more consuming with the knowledge of its inevitability.    

“Yeah,” Tony replies. “You’re going to die. I’m going to pull this thing out of you while you’re dead. And then, if you’re right about being a phoenix, you’re gonna come back, brand-spanking new.” Tony considers Bucky for a moment. “Might even have a new arm. I’ve never lost a limb, so I don’t know.”

“D-don’t know f-f-for sure?” Bucky swallows around his blood and green-tinted lung foam. “C-come b-back-k?”

“Do you?”

Bucky chokes on a laugh.

“That’s what I thought,” Tony says. He sobers. “Look. You know what it’s like. It’s not sleeping, right? It’s deeper, like anesthetic, but it’ll hurt, and it’ll be really fucking scary. But you’re going to come back. Don’t fight it. Hold your breath when you’re on your way. And I’ll be here.”

“S-stay?” The tint has crawled up to his eyes, his ears. Ice has locked Tony’s knees to the asphalt, melting as quickly as it forms.

“Yeah,” Tony murmurs. His eyes catch on the silver shoulder that twitches with a tell-tale beat of a faulty connection; easily fixed, brushed off weeks ago in a feverish haze of hate and fire. He adjusts his grip around Bucky’s freezing hand. “Yeah, I’m going to stay.”

It takes him five more minutes to die, gasping for breath. It takes him thirteen to come back, in the eye of a blizzard of stinging cold wind and ice and a lingering presence of an ever-burning fire.

∞ ∞∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

Everyone in the world has seen Tony Stark’s seventh death.

There are no eyes that have not seen the image of Iron Man falling from the wormhole above New York City. Despite all his work, the suits are not space-faring. He dies up there from the cold and the emptiness, with trails of embers and flames leaking from the seams of his suit as he falls, a dead phone call ringing. He comes back to life as the Hulk’s roar rings in his ears.

A friendly, blue-eyed face above him. Dumbstruck-ecstatic.

♾️

James Buchanan Barnes dies. His choking breaths stop.

Tony Stark weathers the cold and the creeping ice and pulls the jagged barb out of his chest. The wound gapes.

He doesn’t let go of Bucky’s hand, now so cold it _singes_. This was his fault. His fault.

“Death for a death,” he mutters. It’s bitter in his mouth. It doesn’t feel right anymore.

◉

Bucky comes back to life. He holds Tony’s eyes for a long time, just looking, unable to move away. And then the rest of the world comes back; Steve and Falcon and helicopters buzzing above, grabbing hands and raised voices and melting ice.

They get back to the jet without much issue, cleanup left to the Council. Bucky isn’t hobbled in the slightest; he walks without support, brushing off Steve’s supportive shoulder in silence. His hands are fluttering near where the injury once gaped. One arm still metal.

It’s once they’re in the jet when the floodgates open. Everyone speaks at once, overtop, questions and concerns and comments all jumbled together. Tony barely knows what’s going on. He wants a drink. He finds himself fading at the edges, falling into thoughts, when he snaps back to reality like the distinct sensation of a rubber band snapping against his skin.

“Tony,” Steve says, in a tone that means he’s said it more than a couple times.

“What?”

“How’d you know?” It seems Steve got the jet under control when Tony zoned out.

“I can see?” Tony replies.

“Don’t be like that,” Falcon says, obviously saying _don’t be an ass_ beneath it all.

“What? I’m not stupid. I can look past the tip of my own nose, thanks.”

“That is not our concern, Mr. Stark,” Vision says, the familiar voice of reason. Oh, JARVIS—he was reborn, too; but his life was transformed, not reset. It still makes Tony’s chest ache. “Our concern is you may have withheld this knowledge from the team.”

Tony splays his hands. “That seems to be the norm for this team, huh? Withholding information.” He doesn’t have to say _right, Steve?_ to get his point across. Steve, ever astute, catches the hint nevertheless.

“I thought we’ve moved past that, Tony,” Steve says. Indistinct rage lances through him with the sound of bones crunching echoing in his skull. Tony realizes he’s stood up, fist clenched, only when Vision’s hand stops him from charging into Steve’s space. Indignant anger had made him blind and deaf for the briefest of moments, the lizard brain of betrayal and grudges overcoming his better sensibilities.

“It wasn’t his information to share,” Bucky interjects, to Tony’s surprise. He hasn’t moved from his secluded place near the back of the bay, melting into cold shadows. “I asked him to keep it quiet. Blame me, not him.”

“Bucky—”

“I didn’t want to be like him. I wanted to be able to die, but I can’t. Leave it alone.”

Tony turns away. He doesn’t want to look at Steve’s breaking expression. “You can die, alright. Won’t stay dead. That’s where the problem is for you, huh?”

This time, Falcon stops Steve from shoving Tony through the jet hull. “Tony, don’t you d—”

“What, Steve? You think immortality is peaches and cream? It’s a fucking curse, buddy. Howard tried to kill himself a dozen times. I’ve only got forty years on my record but I’ve already tried once, and Bucky will double Howard’s number by morning if you don’t get your brain around the idea we’re both miserable and we’ll stay miserable until we kill each other or another phoenix comes around and gives us a hand. But guess what? There _aren’t_ any other phoenixes so it’s just us!”

Silence falls. Steve barely backs down, but his eyes are wide, lips parting. Tony feels the weight and the pity of every eye on him, heating up his bones.

“Phoenixes suffer,” Tony continues, ruthless. Better Bucky and everyone else fucking know what it’s like. “We burn. After you’re all dead and gone we’ll still be here, in the fallout, and there’s nothing waiting for us after. All we’ve got is each other.”

A humorless laugh. “All I’ve got is the guy that killed my mom. All he’s got is the guy who let him die. So don’t go preaching at me about not keeping you in the loop or saying _mean_ things that should be left unsaid. Fuck that. _Fuck_ you.”

Silence again. This time it lingers, a maligned, malignant thing in the air. Bated breath in poison gas.

“Feel better?” Bucky asks.

“Not really,” Tony replies.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

He does not want to remember the next deaths. He does anyway. Aldrich Killian has Rhodey strung up in a powerless suit and... _uses_ Tony to get him out. Rhodey gives in just before Tony dies screaming. Eight lives down. He comes back, gasping and shuddering, his fires nearly doused in the chill of ice water poured over his head.

“Welcome back, Tony,” Aldrich Killian smiles. His hand glows orange-red-whitehot and settles on the curve of Tony’s neck, hotter than the fire of his resurrection. “Seems like even your kind can die if we burn them long enough.”

Aldrich Killian takes two more lives—nine and ten, it’s only right to keep count, isn’t it?—just because he can. Because he knows Tony Stark will always come back. He may not be able to die for good, but he can still feel the pain of being burned.

◉

Bucky Barnes finds Tony on the roof.

He’s not drunk this time. He wants to be, but he’s not. He hears Bucky approach like a cold front—a slow and quiet, but looming, thing in the distance that approaches slow enough to ignore at first but then it’s on top of him before he realizes it. And that’s how Bucky is. He’s next to Tony in an instant, a chill that hollows out his throat.

They don’t talk right away. There’s not much to say. Tony swallows around the cold nails in his mouth.

“Steve and I used to see eye-to-eye,” Bucky says, after a beat. “But, uh. After everything, it’s tougher. He’s tougher. Don’t get me wrong—I woulda been different if it was me who saw him die. But he’s...we don’t get each other right now, about this. He doesn’t know. He wants to.”

“But he can’t, yeah, I know the story,” Tony replies. He shifts. “Everyone _wants_ to understand. Fuck, the two people I call my best friends don’t get it, either. They think it’s immortality.”

“It ain’t,” Bucky agrees. There’s two high spots of color on his cheeks, the beginnings of a heat flash. “It’s...just death.”

“Again and again.”

Bucky leans against the lip of the roof. He looks down at the wandering ants of people below them.

“Again and again,” Bucky repeats.

Tony takes a deep breath in. He likes how the chill from Bucky’s body makes him shiver as he does. He’s _shivering—_ what a feeling. He turns his head to look at Bucky from the side of his eye. Bucky’s eyes are bright and frosty and tracking the distant, mortal people down on Earth.

“How’re you taking it? It was one of your first this time around, right?”

Bucky blinks. He shrugs. Tony sees the moment he decides to open up instead of brush it off, like he must have been doing all fucking day. “I’m dreaming about it.”

Tony nods. He can’t look away from Bucky’s eyes. How long has it been since he’s looked at another phoenix? How long since he could see someone’s eyes ring bright?

Bucky looks up at him, and Tony realizes that he didn’t respond. Their eyes meet. The mesmerizing energy around them sharpens and grows dizzying as they settle and stare into the other’s eyes. They’re very close together. Hands almost touching on the lip of the roof. Warm breath meets fogged.

Tony can see his own eyes, a ring of bright, molten fold, reflected within Bucky’s, gold within blue. Bucky must be seeing his blue within gold.

Perfect opposites. Hot and cold. A sink and a source. Life and death.

They’re kissing before Tony realizes his eyes have closed. It’s a shock of cold against his mouth that makes him gasp. Bucky hisses into his mouth, leaning into the burn.

Their kind of opposites attract. They attract and repel and attract again. And again. And one more time, because the chill of it—the shivers and the lovely, burning cold—is just on the edge of addictive.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

And we all know who took the twelfth life.

Steve Rogers brings his shield down into Tony’s arc reactor. For a second—for an actual, heart-stopping second—Tony thinks it’s coming down onto his unprotected head. A third and final strike.

It splices the arc reactor and kills the power in his suit. It also caves in his sternum, ribs bending and splintering down into his chest. He gasps. His suit should have been able to take a hit like this—but the vibranium shield his own father made is too cutting, enforced with too much bottle-made power behind it. Blood wells into his lungs, steeping there.

Steve rolls away, pries the shield loose. With the twisting motion, the only compression on his shattered chest relieves itself; his lungs struggle to expand against the sharp edges of his broken-in ribs. His breath stutters when he feels his bones and sternum shift, loose and floating and pressing him down. It is an eerily sensation to drowning, choking on one’s own blood.

“You have no right,” he gasps, rolling to his side, uncaring of the injuries. Pain flares bright and hot behind his eyes, filling his nose with the smell of wildfires and flesh. “You don’t deserve that shield! My father made that— _my father—_ he—”

Blood wells up, dribbles in his teeth. It tastes like ash. He spits it up. He hears the shield clatter to the ground. Tony’s breath catches and clips in his throat. A death rattle.

A pause. A rough intake of breath. “Tony?”

A wavering will. Blood coming up. Fire. The dying sparks of electricity. A heat settling in his bones. A flash of a face—once a friend. Concern. Betrayal. Ice. A touch. _Fire._ Consuming flames. Blood as black as soot. A thud. A skull crack against cement. Weak limbs. Warmth overtaking the cold. Colors blurring. A familiar touch of nothing.

It will not last.

◉

Tony opens his eyes. He turns his head  in his pillow and finds Bucky there next to him, awake, watching him with his eyes filled with that bright fairy-ring of frost.

⧝

“How did you do it?” Tony gasps. There’s thick smoke, ash, clinging in the folds of his throat. Blood still welling in his lungs, his chest punctured by ribs that can’t heal against the concave pressure of his suit. “How did—you make—it stick?”

Barnes looks at him, pale with the cold. Near him, Steve lays, unconscious and burned from touching a phoenix in the midst of a resurrection. “I…”

“My dad,” Tony chokes. His vision is dimming. Is he going to die here, again? He’s trapped here, can’t fight it, can’t remove the pieces crushing him. Oh, god. It’s a terrible way to die. And there’s...he died once, felt the touch. And it’s reaching for him again, the clawed and ash-dark hand grasping to pull him under.

But he has to know. “He...phoenix…?”

Barnes stares at him. His breath is a cloud of ice. But Tony is going again, fading into a breathless blackness. He’s crying involuntarily; fat, ashen tears slide from his eyes into his temple, fading into his hair. He can’t _breathe._

For the first time in a long, long time, Tony viscerally wants his mom.

She does not come. Something cold tugs at his chest, a tug in the most vulnerable part of him. The touch is unknowable to his oxygen-starved mind, almost impossible to discern. Tony struggles for a desperate breath—ice in his throat— but he’s already gone.

Moodboard by [trashcanakin](https://trashcanakin.tumblr.com/)

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!! i hope you enjoyed the fic and the art!! [feignedsobriquet ](https://feignedsobriquet.tumblr.com/) and [trashcanakin](https://trashcanakin.tumblr.com/) did amazing work and i'm very grateful for having worked with them!! please check out their tumblrs!!
> 
> thank you to the iron man big bang staff for putting this together!! check out the other works in their collection, everything is amazing and everyone involved is super talented!!
> 
> leave me a comment or a kudos if you liked this!! xxxx


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